Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin

"The Duff Cooper Award, a literary nonfiction prize, was awarded this year to Sue Prideaux’s highly acclaimed biography Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin . When Five Books editor Sophie Roell spoke to judge Minoo Dishaw earlier this year, he said that Prideaux “shows the comedy of his nature and character, coupled with, often, the extraordinary sadness of the reversals and sufferings that he endured.” Recently, Gauguin has been “monsterized,” he added, but Prideaux’s sympathetic account portrays his life in Tahiti as the artist having adopted “a local way of living which is very strange to modern Western secular eyes.” It’s “an extraordinarily bold and provocative case.” You may also be interested in reading our interview with Prideaux herself, in which she recommends the best biographies of artists . December 20, 2025 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."

"Another nonfiction prize we cover at Five Books is the Duff Cooper Prize, named after the British diplomat who wrote Talleyrand , a biography of the French statesman and one of my father’s favourite books. Despite being a nonfiction prize, it does tend to gravitate towards history books, so is worth keeping an eye on if you like history. This year’s winner was Wild Thing , a biography of Paul Gauguin, the French painter who ended up on Tahiti, and whose reputation biographer Sue Prideaux tries to rehabilitate in this book. She reports, for example, that he was not responsible for bringing syphilis to Tahiti. I was also moved by the chapter on Gauguin’s visit to his friend Vincent van Gogh in southern France, shortly before the Dutch painter’s mental illness got the better of him. Van Gogh painted the sunflowers specially for Gauguin’s visit, to decorate his bedroom."

"It’s about one of the most important painters of his age, a man who helped to steer art towards post-Impressionism and was a huge influence on a whole generation. It’s also rather an extraordinary life about which I knew very little. The book is greatly assisted, I think, by a 200-page memoir which Gauguin himself wrote in the last two years of his life, which had been thought to be lost, but was rediscovered. The contentious part of Gauguin’s life, which no doubt others are very well aware of, was his time in Tahiti. It had a huge influence on his art but was controversial because of his relationship with various very young women (and when I say young, I mean 13- or 14-year-olds). She goes into this in quite an interesting way, with an ethnographic eye on the relationship. She’s very non-judgmental. The attitude of people in Tahiti about marriage, about sexual relations, about the relationship of young women both to their families and to their partners, is both interesting and more complex than you might imagine. She also clears him of the charge that he introduced syphilis to Tahiti, which there’s no evidence for. This is demonstrated by the discovery of four of his teeth, which for some reason he kept. They were discovered relatively recently and subject to scientific analysis and there was no sign of the standard treatment for syphilis. He was quite a difficult man. He changed partners fairly regularly. He had a marriage with several children, but decided to pursue his art, which took him away from his family. They relocated to Denmark and he came back to France. It’s an extraordinary picture of a hand-to-mouth existence of someone of great talent, but talent which was slightly ahead of its time. He’s constantly trying to get involved in exhibitions which are going to solve or relieve the financial pressures that are upon him. You get a picture of quite a multinational group of artists in a similar situation, all looking at each other’s work, often trying to support each other and help each other, though not always. He has a famous visit to van Gogh when van Gogh is clearly having a breakdown. Gauguin leaves just before van Gogh cuts off his own ear after threatening Gauguin with a razor. The book is full of incident and drama. And somehow, in the middle of this, Gauguin produced great art. Sue Prideaux is a master storyteller and a wonderful biographer, and the book really argued its way onto the shortlist without much resistance. She does do it quite persuasively. There is a lot of work here, a lot of context. There’s a lot of cultural understanding, and there is an effort at least, to allow the reader to make up his or her own mind, rather than the biographer dictating or mandating what view to take. She gives you a chance. You don’t have to accept the rehabilitation, but she certainly gives you a fair shot at it."

"It was 30 years ago, by someone called David Sweetman, and so a heck of a lot has come to light since then. Two things happened in 2020-1. Firstly, the catalogue raisonné of Gauguin’s work was at last completed. So you really had all the information on his work. Secondly, in the last three years of his life, Gauguin wrote a book called Avant et après . It’s a 200-page handwritten and indeed hand-illustrated testament. It’s what he thought about life and art and God and everything. It disappeared soon after his death and was published in a messed-up version. Then, in 2020, the original was offered to the British government in lieu of death duties. This manuscript, which had been lost for a century, reappeared. So with that—200 pages of Gauguin’s thoughts in his own handwriting—and the catalogue raisonné it seemed that one had a pretty solid base for a new biography. There were many surprising things. I had no idea he spent his first seven years in Peru, running wild in a palace with jaguars and volcanos—it reads like a magical realist South American novel. Then his mother took him back to France, aged seven. He couldn’t speak French, and he was put in a very strict Catholic seminary. When they bullied him, he put up his fists and said, ‘I’m a wild thing from Peru.’ That gave me the title of the book, but it also gave him his attitude from then on. He’s an outsider, and he’s searching for comparable places. When he lost all his money, the French government paid his passage out to Tahiti to be the official artist. He has this reputation as a French colonialist, going out and taking advantage of the Polynesians, but when he gets there, he’s disgusted by the French colonial regime, which is very oppressive and invasive, bullying the Polynesians. Then, gradually, he becomes their spokesman against the French colonial rulers. He writes to Paris about how the islanders are taxed unjustly. He starts to represent them in the French colonial courts. I was fascinated to discover all that—the papers, the letters he wrote to the authorities in Paris and so on. It’s an aspect of Gauguin in Tahiti which hadn’t been explored and that people don’t really talk about. That’s right, that’s another legend. The other thing that was discovered—not by me—was the birth certificate of Teha’amana, his first ‘wife’ in Tahiti. Everyone said she was 13 but her birth certificate shows she was, in fact, 15. It’s still pretty disgusting, but the age of consent in France and the colonies at the time was 13. In the United States, it was between 10 and 12, except the state of Delaware where it was seven. It disgusts me but Gauguin wasn’t doing anything illegal or at all unusual associating with these young girls. Yes. You use the word love, but actually it’s a burning interest in the work that won’t leave me alone. Nietzsche puts it so well when he talks about ‘a fishhook in the brain’. The fishhook just tugs and tugs and you want to know more and more, and you desperately want to understand."

"In the book, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin , Prideaux somewhat rescues Gauguin’s reputation. For example, analysis of Gauguin’s teeth shows that he did not bring syphilis to Tahiti, the Pacific island where he spent the last years of his life and painted many of his most striking pictures. As a fan of both Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh’s art, I was quite moved by the chapter on Gauguin’s visit to the Dutch painter in southern France, shortly before van Gogh’s mental illness got the better of him. Van Gogh painted the sunflowers specially for Gauguin’s visit, to decorate his bedroom."

"Sue Prideaux combines the strength of argument that I attributed to Mark Gilbert’s Italy book with the style of Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s Buckingham book. She has a clear mission from the start and like Mark Gilbert’s, it’s a rather counterintuitive one. We have, in recent years, seen Gauguin rather monsterised. We’ve seen exhibitions with very sanctimonious captions about race and sexual exploitation and abuse of power or privilege. Venturing upon this book, I suppose my view of Gauguin was affected accordingly, tending to see him as a very great artist about whom I didn’t know a huge amount—I wouldn’t have put him in my top 10, necessarily—but who was notoriously guilty of extraordinary sexual appetite in all kinds of disreputable situations. But what Sue Prideaux shows us instead is quite different. She begins by laying out that she’s going to un-tell that story. Then she goes right back, in a very conventional structure, to relate an extremely unconventional life: Gauguin’s revolutionary grandmother, his beautiful artist mother, his growing up in France, but feeling himself to be alienated from it, ‘a savage from Peru’. She shows the comedy of his nature and character, coupled with, often, the extraordinary sadness of the reversals and sufferings that he endured. The love he felt for his children was very deep and sincere but, ultimately, he was too financially desperate to allow them to live with him. By the time he met them for the last time, they didn’t speak each other’s language—his children could speak only Danish, of which fiendish language his grasp, never tight, had by then altogether forsaken him. We proceed carefully towards Tahiti and the final act. When we arrive there with Gauguin, what we see is someone at odds with the stifling oppression of the French Empire, and willing, as part of this attitude, to take up a local way of living which is very strange to modern Western secular eyes. It’s an extraordinarily bold and provocative case. It’s also beautifully illustrated. There are wonderful juxtapositions—of Gauguin’s portrait of van Gogh with van Gogh’s portrait of Gauguin. There are intelligently, understatedly captioned, huge, luscious Gauguin paintings throughout the book. It’s a very pleasant, beautiful object to handle, to touch, as much as to look at."